Tuesday, January 24, 2012

I have been thoroughly enjoying our latest project at
IntelliFactory. Me and Loïc Denuzière, the creator
of FPish, are working together for
the U Nebraska Medical Center on genetic
visualization with HTML5/WebSharper/F#. The organism of interest is
Staphylococcus aureus. We have built an interactive chart
showing its genome coding sequences and a few thousand transposon
insertions performed in the UNMC labs.

It has been fun to do some graphics and modular arithmetic. We
used Raphael to draw SVG, this has
worked quite well for us, especially after we "fixed" the Raphael API
a little bit for easier use from F# in the latest WebSharper binding.
I also am just starting to realize how much I missed in highschool
biology.

F# may have a great future in bioinformatics. Type providers easily
consuming various data sources, .NET providing decent performance for
numerical algorithms, and WebSharper or Silverlight giving a
browser-accessible UI.. The only limit is your imagination.

In one of the discussions we had, Loïc made an interesting comment.
He said that unlike working in the financial sector, applying F# to
bioinformatics is not just interesting, but also useful.
And though I have not been an Occupy protester, I cannot help
but agree. Realizing that your work may help medical research is
definitely a great motivator.

If you are tempted to work with us, please do
apply: we are
hiring. Interns are especially welcome.

Monday, January 9, 2012

WebSharper 2.4, our latest F# web stack based on a F#-to-JavaScript compiler, is out today, and it is open source, with a dual licensing model: you either use AGPL + OSS exceptions or purchase a commercial license. See details at websharper.com, and source at bitbucket.org.